Black Women Have No Legal Recourse Against Sexual Violence by White Men

Throughout the Jim Crow era, Black women who were raped by white men had virtually no legal recourse. Southern courts did not accept rape complaints from Black women against white men; juries would not convict. The rape of Black women by white men was treated by the legal system as having no victims. This was not only a personal violation but a systemic tool of racial domination: the sexual exploitation of enslaved Black women had been central to slavery, and its continuation under Jim Crow — without the property-protection incentive — was pure racial terrorism and dominance.